Religion Dispatches
…utilitarian terms. And that leads to some very bizarre moral reasoning. Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding wit…
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…nd, for that matter, non-profit organizations can go in restricting the availability of contraception and perhaps other medical care of which they do not approve, remains to be seen. The most visible implication has been the way that the Right then used the third party principle to try to allow conservative Christian business owners to deny service to married same-sex couples, or those intending to be married. The argument (which is disturbingly s…
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…cause of the hate toward us in Baptist communities.” Of course, only time will tell if Liberty will continue its dirty work of trying to turn queer students straight, but one thing remains clear: Liberty continues to be a proudly homophobic university that revels in its disdain for the LGBTQ+ community. As Tessa Russell, a 2020 graduate, indicates in her recent article about being a lesbian at Liberty, homophobia is alive and well on campus—someth…
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…ates on here. In his reply, Douthat performs an interesting misreading of Silk’s position. Silk’s case rests on the extension of the legal logic of conservative religious freedom efforts to religious claims made by polygamist Mormons and Muslims (although the problem posed by the nineteenth-century Reynolds case is oddly missing). Douthat, however, takes Silk to mean that “Republicans and churchgoers” (with churchgoers overtly coded as Evangelical…
Read More…o-powerful-bishops (who then turn a blind eye as you preside over a record number of executions) and occasionally make-noise-about-how-much-you-care-for-the-poor-as-you-gut-social-welfare-programs-type of Catholicism, as detailed by the New York Times, seems positively 20th century. The question now is whether, just as his brother used “compassionate conservatism” to attract Catholics to the GOP, Jeb can toughen-up his Catholicism—particularly his…
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…t state constitutional prohibitions and federal statutory discriminations will be repealed, and judicial opinions will undoubtedly have a role to play in that development. But when that day comes, it will not be in the teeth of strong public opposition. Instead, it will come when many Americans, and maybe most, will be able to acknowledge (even if only grudgingly) the fairness that underlies the change. This kind of alteration in public response i…
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…t have any hope that religious talk will soften into November. I think it will still be there. If Mitt Romney is the nominee, he continually wants to sidestep the religious talk and he has good reason for doing that. People don’t understand Mormonism. Most American Protestants and Catholics have a fundamental distrust or uncertainty about Mormonism, so he wants to play it down. If he brings on a vice presidential candidate like (Virginia governor)…
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…ch Center, called the pace of the continued growth of the religiously unaffiliated “really remarkable.” The number of Americans identifying with no religion grew by 19 million from 2007 to 2014, and now the religiously unaffiliated are “more numerous,” said Smith, than either mainline Protestants or Catholics. Much of the rise of the “nones” is attributable to religious switching, mainly from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism. One-fifth of Am…
Read More…e voters in the Alabama GOP primary—believe the president is a Muslim. The numbers are similar in Mississippi, where 70% of likely GOP voters identified as evangelical. Like in Alabama, where only 25% identified as tea partiers, only 24% of Mississippi voters identified as tea partiers. Again, the candidates are splitting the evangelical vote with Gingrich showing a slight advantage with 33% to Romney’s 28%, and Santorum’s 29%. Of all the responde…
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…nd learning from Buddhist monks, maybe because the taxi ride was making me ill) I found the seals to be palpably and scarily true. And, per the Buddhadharma, I didn’t believe them just because I was taught them (which I had been), or because I read them in a book written by a lama (which I was doing). I believed them because I had found them to be true in my own experience. Which is strange, because I’m not a Buddhist. Not only that, but I’m not i…
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